Last week was Experts 2 Experts Virtualization (E2EVC) Conference time again! This edition was being held in Barcelona. Great location for the 36th edition of this event with attendees coming from 19 different countries!

Benny and Freek presented a session and in this blog post we want to elaborate some more on what they presented. Our session title was called “Microsoft RDS, current state and future vision”.

When we created the abstract for our session somewhere last summer, we came up with the idea to present a session showing the latest evolution of the Remote Desktop Platform. Back then, we weren’t really sure if we would be able to show it or even be allowed talk about it because back then this was all very early stage. Fortunately, 3 weeks before the E2EVC event in Barcelona we were able to get the bits of the very first RDmi Private Preview and successfully installed it in our labs. We contacted the RDS Product Team and they gave us permission to demo both RDmi and HTML5 at E2EVC last week!

RDS Gurus is happy to welcome Esther Barthel to our ranks. Esther is a Citrix CTP, Microsoft MVP and Netscaler Extraordinaire! She brings vast EUC experience and knowledge to RDS Gurus and we are going to use all of it to further the interests of our client base. Check out her bio here. Welcome aboard Esther!

I started my session with the question whether RDS or VDI would still be relevant today. I pointed out that the application landscape of an average organization today already contains a lot of SaaS and Web based applications. Also, Apps from App stores are becoming more common in the corporate world. These types of applications are already enabled for the modern workplace and can already be accessed from any device at any time. I continued by pointing out the traditional Windows Applications. How these types of applications are not enabled for the modern workplace, that they demand a Windows Desktop to run and that in many cases they rely heavily on an application backend. I talked about how many might argue that the Windows Application will disappear in the future. That the Windows Application will be transformed into other form factors like Web-Based and Apps. I agree with that statement but […]

An Independent Remote End-User Experience Performance Benchmark

Based on this Microsoft knowledge base article, “the OneDrive for Business sync app isn’t supported for client sessions that are hosted on Windows 2008 Terminal Services or Windows 2012 Remote Desktop Services (RDS).“ This is also true for RDS running on Windows Server 2016. In order to gain access to OneDrive for Business files, Remote Desktop users have to utilize a web browser.

FSLogix Office 365 Containers however, does support roaming OneDrive for Business cache. So RDS Gurus decided to test the user experience of remote desktop users working with OneDrive for Business in an RDS environment configured to use FSLogix Office 365 Containers. Like our past Outlook testing, we did this by collecting performance metrics as well as video footage of a series of RDS user sessions designed to simulate users working in OneDrive for Business.

Benchmarking Setup

We used the same environment and lab for these test runs as we did for our previous Outlook testing, so refer to that article for the benchmarking setup. Our test steps were also the same, except that we created test sequences and Uber-exes that ran OneDrive for Business workloads. […]

In August, Gabe Knuth published an article on BrianMadden.com describing Teradici’s new product announcements. An important aspect of Teradici’s product offering is their PC-over-IP protocol (PCoIP), an alternative to other remoting protocols. But how good is PCoIP and what are the ideal use cases? To answer this question, we compared the performance of Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and PCoIP in June and July 2017. This project was sponsored by Microsoft with input from Teradici.

Our primary focus was on benchmarking the performance of graphics workloads in Hyper-V virtual machines accelerated by NVIDIA M60 GPUs attached through Discrete Device Assignment (DDA). DDA allows you to pass through a physical GPU that is plugged into the PCI Express bus of the Hyper-V host machine straight to a guest VM.

Test Environment

For this project we used an on premises lab, but because this setup can be deployed on premises using a physical server with an M60 card or in Azure using an NV-series VM, test results are relevant for both on-premises and cloud environments.

An Independent Remote End-User Experience Performance Benchmark

RDS Gurus decided to run performance tests on Outlook in non-persistent environments using FSLogix’s Office 365 Containers solution. We wanted to illustrate the user experience of remote desktop users working in an RDS environment configured to use FSLogix Office 365 Containers relative to the typical user experience when using native RDS UPD technology. Our primary focus was to measure how performance degrades when multiple users are simultaneously working with Outlook (“noisy neighbor effect”).

We did this by collecting performance metrics as well as video footage of a series of test runs where users in remote sessions “worked” in Outlook 2016. All the work was automated. Users opened Outlook and conducted a series of searches that queried the local windows search service (queries against All Mailboxes, All Outlook Items or Subfolders) and queried the Office 365 server search service (queries against current folder and mailbox).

We recorded the on-screen user experience of a primary user, and also collected performance counter data during each test run. In some runs only the primary user taxed the system. In other runs, we introduced a number of secondary users who also “worked” in Outlook. We conducted our tests in an on-premises […]

“Due to the limited number of slots available, we may not be able to provide opportunities to all interested customers at this time. We will let you know about the status of your request by end of August 2017.”

All Remote Desktop Services events logs in a single pane? Every RDS event from machine A and B that has written an event in last 10 minutes? Listen to events from RDS event logs in real time from all RDS related servers in your deployment?

Jason Gilbertson, a Technical Advisor at Microsoft who works closely with the RDS Product team wrote a single PowerShell that does all of the above, and much more!!

Some of the features:

– Export logs locally or remotely to .csv format on local machine grouped by machine name

Although the script is very multifunctional, it has specific parameters for RDS to allow you to collect RDS related event log from all servers that are running RDS roles. So, for example, you can combine all event logs from your RD Connection Broker-, RD Web Access-, RD Gateway- and RD Session Host Servers in single view.

The script also exports to CSV which allows you to feed the exports into Excel Graphs or PowerBI environments for further analysis.

We have been asked more than once for documentation on the RDP protocol, UDP transport, RD Gateway protocol, etc. So we have put a list together of this kind of documentation. RDP Protocol Specifications are at MSDN. Go to the MSDN Library > Open Specifications >. Then go to navigate to Protocols > Windows Protocols > Technical Documents>

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The meaning of “devices” has evolved in the modern workplace, with IT expected to support not only corporate PCs and bring-your-own (BYO) devices, but also manage kiosks, shared single-purpose devices, phone-room resources, collaboration devices such as Surface Hub, and even some IoT devices. Microsoft Intune is the most comprehensive unified endpoint management platform to manage […]